Terra Firma 1939

I wanted to show of a few WIP pictures from Terra Firma, a large scale- WWII themed map for TripleA. The map, based of off World at War, currently has around 1200 land provinces and around 300 sea provinces. I was really interested in creating a map that could be played at a more tactical (maybe even battalion) level, so I felt that the huge number of provinces was necessary. This map is designed for AI play, since I feel it would be cumbersome with multiple players.

Though this is the first map I plan to release to the public, it's the third map I've made so far. Earlier last year, I produced a 1000+ province map of just Europe, complete with around 20 factions and 25 unit types. The map is mostly finished, but was designed for TripleA 1.8. Rather than expend the energy updating that map, I decided to produce Terra Firma, which toned down the province density but scaled up to a global scale.

Here is where the project stands in terms of progress:

Completed:

Map art

Polygons

Centers

Impassable / Sea Attachments

Unit Definitions

Faction and Capitals

Starting Diplomacy

Assign PU's

Pick Faction Colors

Unit Art

Place Starting Units

Add extra capitals

Recolor units (white on white conflict with unit stacks)

Fix Unit Sizes

Started:

Fix Island Polygons (%10 Done)

Fix Neutral Territory (Temporary workaround implemented)

Add island connections (Connections done, graphics needed)

Fix Canals (Temporary workaround implemented, official canals to be added)

Fix Sea Connections (%90 Done)

Edit Unit costs

To Do:

More buildings (different factory types)

D20-Based unit stats

Finalize Rule Set

Balance PU and Starting Units

Remove Territory Names (TBD after a more stable version of the map)

Better unit art

Rename Sea Zones

Desired Features:

Dynamic Diplomacy / Diplomacy through decisions or events

"Strategic" resources for elite units

Faction specific units

1940 Start date for more competitive play

Finally, here's a list of all of the factions in the game. I narrowed down the original 42 to a "concise" 30:
Afghanis
Americans
Arabians
Argentinians
Brazilians
British
Chinese
Colombias
Finnish
French
Germans
Iranians
Italians
Japanese
Mexicans
MinorAllies
MinorAxis
Mongolians
Neutral
Peruvians
Polish
Portuguese
Russians
Salvadorans
Spanish
Swedish
Thailanders
Turkish
Venezuelans
Yugoslavians

@oda Nice looking map. Not sure what zoom level those images are at but hope you've left yourself enough room in each territory for sufficient unit placements. If you have any questions, feel free to post on the forums here.

I never uploaded the EuroTest since it uses unit art that is not my own. Further, while it's playable, there are no stating units other than factories. I had used it with a bid system since I did not know about the XML export system when I made it. Here's an image of the map though:

@oda Wow, that is quite a large map. Though unless you planned some interesting territoryEffects or triggers, you'd need to watch out for some of the larger territories around the perimeter allowing too much movement.

@oda Not really important, but the name "Terra Firma" sounds strange to me. It definitely doesn't make me guess in any ways that's a WWII game; rather something like a FFA with a big continent in the middle to contest.

Though this is the first map I plan to release to the public, it's the third map I've made so far. Earlier last year, I produced a 1000+ province map of just Europe, complete with around 20 factions and 25 unit types. The map is mostly finished, but was designed for TripleA 1.8. Rather than expend the energy updating that map, I decided to produce Terra Firma, which toned down the province density but scaled up to a global scale.

Can you post your a link to your old map. I can easily convert it to version 1.9.

It's an nice looking map. Just to echo @redrum a bit. Since you said it's based on WAW map. I really hope you enlarged the overall image. Or your in for some trouble on overcrowding issues. Especially if you have large unit rosters.

Yep, like @Cernel says, the name doesn't even remotely make me think of a ww2 map. Might be a good idea to rename it.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Over the past few days I have completed around %60 of the PU's placements all of the starting diplomacy, and a little more of the unit art. Now to the feedback:

I completely agree that the map is on the small side. The original dimensions of the map were around 30,000x11,500. This gargantuan size brought the polygon and center pickers to a hold, even after upping the allocated memory for these programs. I settled on a final dimension of around 15,000x6,000. Although this is less than ideal, most of the provinces can hold a good few units before they start to overflow.

Also, I'd be more than happy to change Terra Firma's name. My Europe map was called EuroTest, so I am perhaps not the most proficient when it comes to naming. My thought behind Terra Firma is that it is a really, really big map of the entire world. If anyone has a better idea for a map name, please let me know.

@oda Interesting, I'd be interested in what size @Hepps Global Dominance map is and if it caused the polygon and center pickers to lag. Those could probably be optimized some in order to support larger maps if necessary.

@rogercooper I believe that is not a correct translation, especially since "terris" is the dative plural; so that would mean "at the earth(s)", and I'd leave Pulicat give suggestions here, since he is a professional, and I would not be 100% sure to get it right. Also "ad" means mainly "to", not "at" (you use it to mean going at war, not to mean being at war).
An easy one would be "bellum in terris" (war on Earth(s)), but Latin sounds kind of funny for WWII.

Alright, I'm a good way into the unit placements and I agree that I'd like to scale up the map. I tried increasing the current map size by %50 to an approximate size of 22,000 x 9,000. The exported image is 1,843KB. Before starting the center picker, I allocated the maximum memory, 4096MB via the map maker. When I ran the new map through the center picker, the program loaded a blank image and gave me the following error:

Is there any way around this? I am using Windows 10, with 16GB memory. I'll be happy to provide more info is needed, or post this question somewhere else on the forums if this is the wrong place for it. Thanks.